Saturday, May 12, 2012

It wasn't supposed to be like this - at least that was the hope - when Democrats chose Charlotte to host the national convention, where Obama will formally accept his party's presidential nomination for a second time, Sept. 4-6.

When Democrats announced the choice in February 2011, they said selecting the Southern city signaled Obama's intent to fight hard for the conservative-leaning state like he did in 2008. They also highlighted the economic transformation in the state and in Charlotte - from tobacco, textiles and furniture-making to research, energy and banking. Party leaders noted the state's strong political leadership and expressed hope that a Perdue re-election bid would get a boost from the attention that would be lavished on the convention.

Now traditional Democratic Party groups are threatening huge protests in part because they're deeply uncomfortable that the convention is being held in one of the least union-friendly states. And thousands of Democrats across the country are calling for the convention to be relocated because of the gay-marriage vote.

The eight donors are “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” and some of them have even been on the “wrong side of the law,” according to President Obama’s Keeping The GOP Honest site....

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces...

Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that President Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies list,' I knew it was like taping a target on my back." But the more he's thought it through, "the public beatings and false accusations that followed are no deterrent. These tactics will not work in America." He's even "contemplating a second donation."

Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney's campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama's re-election campaign, as well as what's really behind the drive for more "transparency" in political donations.

In 2012, President Obama’s campaign has managed to make Nixon’s list look quaint, legitimate and even routine. This week, on the president’s ominous “Truth Team“ campaign website, his staff listed the names of eight of his likely opponent’s donors. (See how they were listed, at the link)

This is the first time Romney has reached the 50% level of support and is his largest lead ever over the president. It comes a week after a disappointing jobs report that raised new questions about the state of the economy.

Romney friend Stu White dropped the first bombshell on the Washington Post’s phony story, telling ABC News “he was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair, and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.” The assertion that he was “long bothered” by Romney’s alleged display of full-contact barbering was entirely false, and there is no way to claim it was not a deliberately false impression inserted into the Post story, since they knew perfectly well that they are the ones who told White about it, just a few weeks ago.

Much worse for the Post was a statement released by John Lauber’s sister Betsy, which reads, in full: “The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda. There will be no more comments from the family.”

Wow. Just… wow.

...It’s really interesting the way the Washington Post chose to end their article, by noting that Romney received an alumni award just a year after John Lauber’s untimely death. You know what happened a year before Lauber lost his battle against liver cancer? A boat carrying a family of four, two friends, and the family’s dog sprang a leak on Lake Winnipesaukee, dumping them into the dark waters of early evening, and leaving them to howl in terror as other boats zipped around them. Mitt Romney and two of his sons happened to be vacationing in the area. They jumped onto jet skis and raced to the rescue. Governor Romney was pulled off his jet ski at one point. They even saved the dog, a Scottish terrier.

A couple of years before that, Romney performed a similar rescue for a group of kayakers who were shoved onto hard rocks by fierce winds.

In 1996, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Bain Capital partner was kidnapped. When Mitt Romney learned of this, he shut down the entire multi-million dollar firm and flew the entire staff to New York, so they could help look for the girl. Romney hired private detectives, set up a toll-free tip line, coordinated with the NYPD, papered the streets with fliers, contacted every Bain customer in the city, and personally hit the bricks with the Bain crew to join the search. They found her, just in the nick of time – she was dying from an overdose of drugs in a New Jersey basement. She was only rescued because someone saw news coverage of Romney’s search efforts.

Thirty years earlier, Mitt Romney was a high school student who may, or may not, have been slightly more of a jerk than the average teenage boy. How’s that for an “evolution?” Why on Earth would any reasonable person think his high school misadventures tell us more about his character than his deeds later in life?

Apparently, Obama was satisfied until Sunday to have the White House keep right on misleading people through to the convention, too. Instead of taking a principled stand, Obama wanted time his pander for the most politically opportune time, even if that meant continuing to fib about his position.

His embrace of the position that "states should decide" not only runs into the leftist objection that racial discrimination was once a states' rights issue, but also contradicts his administration's decision not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

... Obama's new position in support of gay marriage fits well with his opposition to DOMA as regards federal recognition of same-sex marriages, but his resort to the states' rights argument would seem to affirm one of DOMA's central provisions.

“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages,” he wrote in answer to a questionnaire back then. In 2004, he was running for the U.S. Senate and needed to appeal to voters statewide. So he evolved, and favored civil unions but opposed homosexual “marriage.” In 2008, running for president, he said, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” Now in 2012, facing a tough reelection campaign where he needs energized supporters of gay “marriage” and has disappointed them with his refusal to give them his support, he is for it.

Answering a questionnaire in 1996, he wrote: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages,and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

With the slavish assistance of the media, Obama has been conveniently permitted to pretend to be “moderate” on an issue where his actual position has always been radical.

What is pathetic, as I say, is that everybody knows Obama could not have won even the Iowa caucus in 2008 if he had been campaigning as openly pro-gay-marriage — that is to say, clearly to the left of Hillary Clinton on this issue.

In order to enhance his “viability,” the media bit their tongues and looked the other way while Obama engaged in a flimflam charade of moderation. He would have carried on that dishonest scam as long as necessary to win the general election, except that his big-money gay donors threatened to cut him off. And what his media idolators now will celebrate as another “gutsy call” never would have happened otherwise!

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

With more than three-quarters of the vote counted, the winner had attracted 60 percent of the vote to Lugar's 39 percent in a race that showed the power and influence of outside groups, the liabilities now associated with having a long congressional career, and a Republican electorate trending more conservatively in Indiana.

The contest, though, was always about Lugar: Observers noted than any enthusiasm surrounding this race involved sending the incumbent into retirement.

The 60-year-old Mourdock will face three-term Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly in November. The fiscally conservative Republican has been elected to state-wide office twice, and is favored to win the seat, especially as the state is trending red in the presidential election.

Democrats are pretty mad about two states today, North Carolina over Amendment One and West Virginia over the felon vote. Keep in mind a few facts: Both states have Democratic governors, 3 or their 4 Senators are Democrats, Obama won North Carolina and picked that state to host his renomination convention.

Judd is also known as federal prison inmate Number 11593-051 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, where Judd is serving a 210-month sentence for extortion and
making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999.

The votes appear to be votes against President Obama rather than for Judd.

North Carolinians think of the state as progressive, but that’s within the context of the rest of the South, said Andrew Taylor, a political scientist at N.C. State University. “This is a socially conservative state,” he said. The state has a 16-year-old law banning same-sex marriage.

...this is unlikely to end well for the protesters, although the Chicago police are cordoning off so much of the city that Ayers and his mob may not be able to get arrested even if they try. Ultimately this all seems more than a little pathetic. With most of the Bush anti-war left exposed as the hypocrites they are under President Obama, Ayers has been left with no other option but to try to rally the occupy movement in support of this cause. Occupy is mostly drawn from the same crowd so I’m sure they will be game. And if there is any violence next week more likely than not it will be the anarchists from occupy instigating it. But now you know who will be pulling the strings.

Actually my favorite part of this clip comes right at very beginning when Ayers says: “the opposite of moral is not immoral, the opposite of moral is indifference“. This is the underlying liberal belief system in a nutshell isn’t it? There is no objective good or evil, or right or wrong. The only real sin is not to care and so long as you are motivated by this conviction then any action is justifiable....

California Republican Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro will be in Eureka for two events on Thursday, May 17 as part of a statewide barnstorming tour to promote the GOP as “the party of Yes.”

He will be the featured speaker at the 12 Noon luncheon of the Humboldt Republican Women Federated at the Elks Club. Reservations may be made at 839-5538.

From 5-6:30 p.m. that day the Humboldt County Republican Party will sponsor a “town hall” meeting featuring Del Beccaro at the Eureka Women’s Club, 1530 J Street. It is open to the public. He will discuss the Republican “Yes” theme in terms of job creation, tax reform and regulatory reform and will take questions from the audience.

Del Beccaro’s tour began on May 7 on the steps of the state capitol and will take him to more than a dozen cities this month. In addition to his party chairmanship, he is a columnist for Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and author of “The New Conservative Paradigm.”

"The family and its foundational role in America's economic success, a central point of our campaign, was discussed at length," Santorum said. "I was impressed with the Governor's deep understanding of this connection and his commitment to economic policies that preserve and strengthen families."

The conventional wisdom, largely wrong, among Californians was that Republicans in state government were obstructionists. The Party who wouldn’t compromise. The Party which responded to every call for reform with a chorus of “No’s.” These days, however, there are many more reasons to take a fresh look at who’s pushing for reform, and who has truly adopted the mantra of “No.”

Let’s start with Pension Reform. Public opinion polls affirm that Californians now recognize the need for substantive pension reform. Pension obligations for the retired, and soon to retire public workforce are already taking away monies that should be available for basic services like good schools, freshly paved roads and public safety. But when Republican lawmakers joined with Governor Brown, asking for nothing more than a simple up or down vote on his very modest pension reform plan – which prompted the LA Times to dub Republicans the Party of Yes, the Democrats who run the legislature said No, and have quietly pushed aside any hope of real pension reform for the foreseeable future...

Republicans are also saying Yes to common sense regulatory relief and Yes to budget plans that will boost hiring and perhaps let California at least catch up to the rest of the country’s jobs recovery.... More at the link

Republican Party, "Right Track, California!" tour. Chairman Tom Del Beccaro and the California GOP talk directly to the people as a part of its whistle stop tour to raise voter awareness about GOP solutions to get California back on track.

It’s hard to know where to start. First, while the rest of the nation comes out of recession – albeit slowly – California is doing some serious backsliding. According to the Controller’s office, government revenues are down compared to this time last year. The percentage decline was not all that great, from $40.97 billion to $40.81 billion, but the shortfall from Governor Brown’s proposed budget is a big number; more than $2 billion.

Compare these dismal numbers with Texas which, as of March, has seen a 12% increase in revenue.

Second, credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s issued a sobering statement expressing a lack of confidence that California’s political leadership could resolve the budget shortfall without the usual gimmicks. Bluntly stated, S & P said that it anticipates “budget maneuvers that may be politically expedient but fiscally unreliable.”

Third, for the eighth year in a row, California is ranked by CEO Magazine as the worst state in America in which to do business. California’s anti-business climate is legendary in the rest of the nation, and this year proved to be no exception. What is notable, however, were the brutal comments by business leaders who participated in the survey.... More, at the link.

Even as President Barack Obama and Holder co-opt the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric of getting “tough” on the Big Banks and Big Finance, the Newsweek investigative report reveals that Eric Holder has not criminally charged or prosecuted a single top executive from any of the elite financial institutions thought responsible for the financial crash. And why would they? As Boyer and Schweizer report, “through last fall, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates; employees of Bain Capital donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to Romney, who founded the firm.”

CNN showed how Obama and Ayers' "paths repeatedly crossed" as members of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Project, where for seven years, "Bill Ayers and Obama, among many others, worked on funding for education projects, including some experiments supported by Ayers." In another sound bite, National Review Online's Stanley Kurtz characterized how this funding worked: "Instead of giving money directly to schools, they gave men to what they called external partners, and these external partners were often pretty radical community organizer groups."

Ayers and Obama were board members for the Woods Fund, another foundation which donated money to liberal groups: "Among its recipients -- Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church, where Obama attended, and a children and family justice center where Ayers' wife worked."

...Those with capital—slurred as one-percenters, fat cats, and corporate jet owners unless hit up for Obama campaign donations—are not hiring or buying. Maybe they think oncoming Obamacare will smash them. Maybe they see on the Obama horizon rampant inflation, debt cancellation, or higher taxes as planned liberal remedies for our endless borrowing. Maybe these shrugging Atlases see that fossil fuel energy is not pursued on federal lands, but needless new regulations are implemented.

Whatever the reason, they hesitate—only sorta buying here, kinda hiring there. And the result of millions of these collective hesitancies is an ossified Europeanized economy, run by technocrats without private sector experience and exempt from the sacrifice they demand of others, as they desperately try to borrow and grow the government to ensure a permanent lease on power...

Hollande has promised more government spending and higher taxes — including a 75-percent income tax on the rich — and wants to re-negotiate a European treaty on trimming budgets to avoid more debt crises of the kind facing Greece. That would complicate relations with Germany’s Angela Merkel, who championed the treaty alongside Sarkozy.

Hollande also pledged to lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 (which Sarkozy had raised from 60 to 62) and to add 60,000 employees to France’s public education system. And yet the budget, according to another of Hollande’s campaign promises, will be balanced by 2017.
What’s French for “good luck with that”?

...The public is generally unaware of how essential nominally classified information is to coverage of diplomatic and strategic news. As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.

So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to....”

...President Obama launched his campaign by telling Americans not to ask if they are better off than they were four years ago, but how they'll be tomorrow. This follows a jobs report that found more than 340,000 Americans dropping out of the labor force and an unemployment rate that remains unacceptably high.

University officials claim the protesters have disrupted agricultural research by faculty scientists and students in the College of Natural Resources. At one point, Mogulof said, the squatters pruned some fruit trees on the property and explained to the dean of resources that they had to do it because the trees were diseased. Turns out the pruned branches were part of a research project on how diseases affect fruit trees, he said.

The university wants the land vacated by mid-May in order for certain agricultural research studies to be conducted.

"We have stated publicly and made clear to the occupiers that research and a tent city cannot co-exist," Mogulof said.

Monday is the last day to register to receive a sample ballot booklet in the mail. Voters who submit voter registration cards after Monday will not receive a sample ballot booklet by mail. They'll only receive a notice advising them of their polling location.

Voters can request a vote-by-mail ballot from the elections department Monday through May 29.

Boise State saw its freshmen enrollment from California rise tenfold during the last decade. Arizona State doubled its enrollment of freshmen from California. The University of Oregon has quadrupled it, with freshman enrollment from California growing from 280 in 2000 to 1,100 in 2010.

...The trend, revealed in a Bee review of federal data, comes as the University of California system has stepped up its own efforts to attract out-of-state students. Despite those moves, taken largely to pay the bills, the number of students leaving the state for a four-year college far outpaces the number coming here....

The worst-case scenario for California is that a large number of students who leave the state for college don't return, leading to "brain drain."

...California still retains a higher rate of high school graduates than many other states, including New York. It's fallen from near the top to the middle of the pack.

But California needs all the college graduates it can get, said Thad Domina, assistant professor of education at UC Irvine.

"The creation of human capital," he said, "is a major driver for economic growth."

The “RNC Welcoming Committee” obviously was an extreme group and he knew it. Darby is a hero for revealing and stopping their bomb plots. Of course, he was vilified by the Left as a “snitch” and a “rat,” while the media focused on the idea of him betraying the liberal cause instead of shining a light on the radicals who sought to attack and harm innocent people attending the RNC....

In ◼ "Occupy Unmasked," we seek to expose the roots of what is now called Occupy Wall Street, tracing its insidious origins. Check out ◼ the film’s trailer on our website for a snapshot of what’s to come, and be sure to sign up for email updates about the documentary’s progress. Together we can continue Breitbart’s legacy, do the job the media refuses to do, and unmask the radical Left 's plans to fundamentally change America and eliminate what makes it great.

...what Obama promises – especially in his second term — is a socialism of permanent elites, a kind of new, very American, version of the old Soviet-style nomenklatura. And those who are in it will get to stay in it (via government support) as social mobility, aka the American Dream, diminishes or disappears....

I admit that using this Soviet terminology… nomenklaturas, politburos… is perhaps excessive. We all know that could not happen here. The grey rigidity of the Soviet lifestyle seems antithetical to sunny American optimism and flare.

But we could have our own way of adopting such things. They could come in through the back door… or the front pages of a newspaper… or the way someone sings the national anthem at the Staples Center or how we look at the fireworks display (all made in China) on the Fourth of July.

He said Romney, a multi-millionaire former venture capitalist, wanted to reward himself and rich friends with tax reductions and "rubber stamp" slashing spending cuts on education, clean energy and health care for the elderly.
"Ohio, I tell you what, we cannot give him that chance ... this is not just another election, this is a make or break moment for the middle class," Obama said.

Now, the revelation that an ex-girlfriend in Dreams was a “composite” or “compression” of several women — as President Obama reportedly told biographer David Marannis — has focused new attention on Cashill’s argument that Ayers was Obama’s ghostwriter.
The so-called “New York girlfriend” in Obama’s memoir bears specific resemblance to Ayers’s ex-girlfriend Diana Oughton, one of three Weather Underground members killed in 1970 when a bomb the terrorist group was building accidentally exploded....

In the wake of Maraniss’s report that Obama had admitted the ”New York girlfriend” was ”compressed” — a composite character – the similarities to Oughton previously noted by Cashill caused the Bookworm Room blog to remark: “I mean, what are the odds that you’d combine a whole lot of different women in your life, and then come up with Bill Ayers’ girlfriend?”

Welcome

Hi, I'm John Schutt, chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee: Want to get involved? We need republicans for open spots on the central committee, committee seats, letters to the editor writers, and more. Send me your thoughts and ideas on making Humboldt great again. Please feel free to call the office (442-2259) or leave a message here (or on Facebook) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.